stumbling into Steve before becoming aware of his presence. When they did, they got out fast. One look was all it took to realize he was up to serious business they wanted no part of.
His vantage point gave him a clear sightline on the club’s front and parking lot. The front entrance was the only way the customers entered and exited the building. There were fire exits in each of the long side walls, and a back door that opened onto a loading platform, but they were off-limits to all but staffers, to prevent any deadbeats from trying to beat the house after running up a hefty bar tab. The oversized, hulking goons that served as bouncers and club personnel weren’t being paid to let anyone pull a fast one on them.
The parking lot had a single entrance/exit that accessed the street. Steve knew the layout of the club; he’d been in there earlier tonight while dogging his quarry, and he’d made sure to survey the layout of the joint. Not that he expected his man to execute any evasive maneuvers; Quentin simply wasn’t the type. He didn’t know he was being followed and even if he did, he wasn’t built for any kind of action that might scuff up his expensive, Italian-made tasseled loafers.
Durwood Quentin III, to give him his full monicker. A multimillionaire with a kink for the down-and-dirty side of the street. With his money, he could have been playing around with high-fashion models or high-line, five-thousand-dollar-a-night call girls.
Instead, he prowled the low-down side of the capital’s nighttime world, making the rounds of strip clubs, titty bars, and hustler dives, the raunchier the better. He also had a tendency to top off the evening by picking up street hookers and knocking off a quickie in his car. With some of the hard skanks he’d been dallying with, he was lucky one of them hadn’t cut his throat for his wallet and watch. Which would have saved Steve Ireland some trouble.
Steve had become an instant expert on Quentin’s wayward ways because he’d been tailing him on his forays for the last few nights, after first drawing the assignment to neutralize the financier.
Know your target, learn his pattern to find his point of maximum vulnerability, and strike. That was how Steve Ireland operated, and he was very good at his job. Or at least, he had been, before the hazards of war had put a serious hurting on him and laid him up in a recovery ward for the better part of six months. He was just getting back into harness with the Quentin sanction.
It wasn’t until tonight, though, that he’d learned that someone else was also on Quentin’s trail. A combination of luck and skill had caused Steve to spot the interloper before the stranger had spotted him. It takes one to know one, and Steve had tagged the other as a hunter, too.
Earlier, when Quentin had first exited his expensive Georgetown townhouse and pulled away in his car to begin his nightly prowling, Steve had been surprised to notice a second car take off after Quentin’s Cadillac and start following it. The newcomer was a black Crown Victoria.
Steve nosed his machine in line after the other two and brought up the rear. The night air was hot, muggy, but the air conditioner was off and the windows open. He liked it better that way. It kept him in closer contact with his surroundings than if he’d been sealed inside a closed car with the AC on.
Quentin drove across the Rock Creek Bridge into the city proper, trailed by the two tail cars, the Crown Vic and Steve’s machine, a nondescript dark-colored late-model sedan. There was plenty of traffic and Steve was a skilled shadower, so he had no trouble keeping tabs on his quarry and the unknown second party who’d interjected himself into the scene. Steve didn’t even have to stick too close to Quentin; all he had to do was keep his sights on the Crown Vic that was following the Cadillac.
The three cars threaded a maze of streets named for the letters of the alphabet and the states of the union. Steve used all of the shadower’s tricks, sometimes fading back, other times passing both vehicles and letting them overtake him, occasionally pulling over to the curb and switching off his lights for a few beats to make it look like he’d reached his destination, then falling in behind a van or truck and using it as cover to switch on his lights and resume the pursuit.
Several times, he caught a glimpse of the Crown Vic’s driver and lone occupant, a big guy with close-cropped dark hair and a mustache. Only a glimpse, though; he didn’t want the other guy to get too good a look at him and realize that the tailer was being tailed. Steve had an advantage in that he’d followed Quentin for several nights previously and had a pretty good idea where he was going; the sequence of stops might vary, but the ultimate destination remained the same.
Like an iron filing drawn by a magnet, the Cadillac traced a course away from the blocks of federal office buildings and well-lit monuments, arrowing toward the raunchier side of town, a vice district in all but name.
Of course, that was all a matter of perspective, Steve sourly reflected; to the taxpayer, the whole governmental apparatus could be considered a vice district, the difference being that unlike the politicians, the screwing the hookers gave you was a lot more straightforward and honest.
The shadow man who was tailing Quentin injected a new variable into the equation, one that Steve didn’t like so well. He’d already gotten a feel for Quentin’s habits and rhythms, and had pretty well worked out how and when he was going to carry out the sanction. The newcomer was a complicating factor, and that never boded well for an operation. For one thing, it indicated that a third party was involved.
Steve was operating solo on this assignment, but he was part of a larger apparatus; the same could be true of the stranger.
Durwood Quentin III was a person of interest to any number of outside interests, official and otherwise. He had a blueblood pedigree. His people were Old Money; he’d attended the right prep schools, graduated from an Ivy League college and postgrad business school, and been slotted into a fast-track position in a prestigious Wall Street brokerage house. He’d married a former debutante, the heiress to a considerable fortune herself, and fathered a couple of kids on her. He belonged to the right clubs, played a good game of tennis and a fair game of golf.
He’d had all the advantages, but inevitably, his true nature had asserted itself and brought him to his present delicate condition. He was a plunger and long-shot bettor with other people’s money, namely his clients’ financial accounts. He had the temperment of a degenerate gambler, always doubling up and redoubling on ever riskier speculations, finally descending to outright fraud and chicanery.
He’d posted spectacular profits at first, at least on paper, but came a day when he couldn’t make a margin call, and the entire towering pyramid of options and hedges and credit-default certificates and junk bonds had all come tumbling down like a house of cards.
His family were big-money contributors to the current administration in the White House; their clout had kept him from being prosecuted by the Securities and Exchange Commission for stock fraud. By then, his marriage was already long defunct; his compulsive womanizing had seen to that.
The Quentin name and family conections still counted for something, Durwood using them to land himself a post as CEO of Brinker Defense Systems, a Washington-based defense contractor. There was no such person named Brinker associated with the company, as it turned out; the name was an inside joke cooked up by its founders, alluding to the fact that they skated on the brink of solvency and legality.
Quentin made a perfect front man, exploiting his contacts with a clique of civilian political appointees in the Pentagon’s procurement department to land Brinker some nice fat contracts. Brinker’s products proved to be of the same quality as the bad paper Quentin had been pushing at the brokerage house: defective, when not actually nonexistent.
The sweet ride had hit a speed bump when Brinker landed a deal to supply weapons to Iraqi and Afghani police forces
